In this edition of The Out Door, we explore why Kim Gordon has proven to be the most adventurous member of Sonic Youth since the band's demise, trace multi-instrumentalist Ashley Paul's journey from studying music to busking in the subway, create new instruments with cellist Hildur Gudnadóttir, and explore the pros and cons of technique with three young guitarists: Matthew Mullane, Cam Deas, and Norberto Lobo. (Follow us on Twitter and Tumblr for more experimental music news and info.)

I: Sonic Rebirth

____Body/Head: Kim Gordon and Bill Nace

I could have slept until the morning. Not long after the sun went down on a recent late fall Saturday, I fell asleep on the couch, tired from too much work during the week and too much fun during the weekend. But eventually, I rolled over and saw the time. I knew that if I was going to see Body/Head, who had already played one of the best sets I’d seen all year, I’d better stir sooner rather than later. It was a benefit, after all, for women’s healthcare in politically beleaguered North Carolina, and I’d bought two pricey tickets that afternoon.

Perhaps I should have simply considered the money a donation, though. This set from the typically excellent duo of Kim Gordon and Bill Nace felt perfunctory, as though they too had struggled to rise from an early-evening rest. On the stage of Kings, a mid-sized club in the state’s capital, the pair struggled to lock into a single, unified approach during two short improvisations. At one point, Nace thrashed about at center stage, slinging his guitar against the volume pumping from his amplifier; the action made me think of someone trying to kickstart a particularly cantankerous motorcycle.

And near set’s end, Gordon left the microphone to push her guitar against a wall at the stage’s rear, slowly pushing it toward the ceiling. It seemed in part like an offering or maybe a way to give the thinning crowd something to see more than a very good band trying and failing to find an inroad into this one-off show. They were both good-faith gestures, I suppose, but neither Nace nor Gordon could make the moment anything more than an instance where the risk of improvised music surpassed the reward.

I was disappointed, of course, as that couch certainly felt comfortable. In some way, though, watching Body/Head struggle to cohere or compel was a reassuring feeling, evidence of a group that is working out new definitions of how it sounds, functions, and defines itself every time it plugs in its instruments, whether onstage or in a studio. Only eight months earlier, in a grand auditorium in Knoxville, Tennessee, Nace and Gordon dazzled. Their collective volume locked into daring sculptures and then splintered into a dozen irregular shards. Standing in front of ponderous video projections, the pair moved as if they were trapped inside an amoeboid world of their own, communicating in a language that only they understood but that the listener could at least enjoy. With her voice, Gordon seemed to channel the stories of forever-anxious ghosts.

So, in the last eight months, had Body/Head just gotten bad, somehow slipping out of practice or energy? No, they just tried something that didn’t work. That’s the gamble of experimental music—or at least it should be.

As surprising as it may seem given the avant bona fides of her former bandmates, Gordon has emerged as the true cutting-edge alumna of Sonic Youth, following her split with longtime husband and collaborator Thurston Moore in 2011. Sure, Moore has continued to piss collaborations with other stars of the avant world, but his two big records—the ones with proper label campaigns, full tours and so on—have been fine-but-functional indie rock bores. Chelsea Light Moving was a mess of ideas united by stand-and-deliver songs, while the most powerful moments of his recent The Best Day sounds like Sonic Youth’s Murray Street, minus the ecstasy of urgency. Steve Shelley has become something of a singer-songwriter timekeeper for hire, and Lee Ranaldo’s pair of records with his band the Dust make you wonder where all that roots-rock came from. (The new one, granted, is better than the last.) It’s as if Moore and Ranaldo required the frisson of sharing a band to push past the cores of their songs, while Gordon was simply waiting for a chance to float free.

The natural question, of course, is why Gordon has suddenly outstripped the rest of Sonic Youth. Perhaps she’s found a creative chemistry with Nace and a place where the two can try new approaches without the fear of failure, even when their sets fall apart (or never form at all). But that rationale feels thin for several reasons, not least of which is the implication that Moore and Ranaldo, especially, haven’t worked with interesting musicians in the interim. To the contrary, Moore’s current band features Shelley on the drums and My Bloody Valentine multi-instrumentalist Debbie Googe on bass. In the past three years, he’s issued recordings with Loren Connors, Mats Gustafsson, and John Zorn, and jammed with Merzbow and longtime collaborator John Moloney. Ranaldo’s collaborators have included John Medeski and Alan Licht. Such casts and company don’t exactly make you pity either songwriter.

Rather, in the scattered interviews that she’s given the last few years, Gordon has simply seemed more connected with the currents of the world around her. In a New Yorker feature last year, she dismissed the idea of worrying about studios or equipment configurations, a nod not only to Body/Head’s embrace of the clipped and distorted, but also to more modern and egalitarian modes of making music. A week ahead of that North Carolina show that never took off, she told me that the kind of music Body/Head made mattered now because people’s tastes had broadened due to the technology-aided spread of strange music and art. In an age of instant online access, she added, a stream was no surrogate for high-volume, improvised sound made to suit a certain situation and room. “You can see a clip,” she said, “but it’s not the same as being in the actual place and feeling the sound in your body.” Who has time to stand and deliver folk-rock songs, like Ranaldo, or try to relive past glories, like Moore, when that’s the way you see the world spinning?

And maybe there’s a delightful bit of revolt against the “girl in a band” assumption Gordon faced for so many years, too. In that same New Yorker piece, Gordon spoke about the range of opportunities that Sonic Youth had afforded her. “Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own,” she said. “I’m grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.” But now with Body/Head, she’s going places Sonic Youth never did, unbound by the lack of frontmen and faces surrounding her. “Who made up all the rules in the culture?” she told Elle a few months later, tapping into another current involving Pussy Riot, rebellion, and power. “Men—white male corporate society. So why wouldn’t a woman want to rebel against that?” — Grayson Haver Currin